


shameful company

by mareza



Series: in quiet rooms [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alcohol, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, past Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius/Duchess Fraldarius, referenced Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius/Lambert Egitte Blaiddyd (one-sided)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:20:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23133061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mareza/pseuds/mareza
Summary: Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius's wife dies soon after the birth of his second son. Overwhelmed by grief, he goes to Gautier to seek comfort from an old friend.He gets what he came for.
Relationships: Ambrose Rene Gautier/Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, Margrave Gautier/Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius
Series: in quiet rooms [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664935
Comments: 14
Kudos: 57





	shameful company

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : This deals extensively with grief, grief-related depression, and unhealthy relationship dynamics. We’re talking an unhealthy friendship sliding into toxic as one man sinks deep into his sorrow and the other, on seeing this, totally fails to understand the depths of the other's grief and thinks it's a great moment to renew an old relationship. Ambrose is technically helping Rodrigue, but in an inherently unhealthy, self-centered way, oblivious to why like, maybe he should just give Rodrigue a hug and tell him it's okay instead of offering to sleep with Rodrigue while he's drowning in grief? This story is miserable, and it's about the terrible ways a person might seek comfort while miserable. Alcohol is consumed in unhealthy ways as part of this. 
> 
> This fic also includes memories of deaths from a plague and an implicit reference to the later unhealthy sex decision (which is also implicit adultery, although Margravine Gautier doesn't care and has her own affairs), as well as some xenophobia about people from Sreng and references to the Sreng–Faerghus conflict.
> 
> This entire thing is just No One Should Follow Rodrigue’s Example for Grieving, Round One.
> 
>  **Notes:** So. This was originally posted on twitter, where I contextualized it, but I'll do my best to explain. This exists in the same universe as [Wine Red](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21802435/chapters/52026232) and takes place just about ten years later, when Rodrigue is 29 and Ambrose is 30. Ambrose is Margrave Gautier; Eris is Rodrigue's late wife and Felix's mother, and Petyr is Count Galatea.  
>    
> The basic idea is to explore what Sylvain's father, who is implied to have had some similarities to Sylvain, might have been over his life time as he grows into being the terrible parent we all know, as a sort of "the kids break the cycle so now let's look at how the parents perpetuated it" thing. 
> 
> In this, back at the Academy, Rodrigue had a thing for Lambert, Ambrose had a thing for Rodrigue, and Ambrose and Rodrigue had a very emotionally messy tryst, but afterward they all went and did their compulsorily heterosexual marriages for Crest babies. Rodrigue later fell in love with his wife, while still being in love with Lambert and also being unable to stop caring about Ambrose even while he watched Ambrose become a worse and worse person, because Rodrigue is not capable of letting go of anything. 
> 
> And so ten years later after their Academy tryst, and shortly after Eris dies, you get this bad idea from him.

Rodrigue at times comes to Ambrose, but Ambrose does not often come to Rodrigue. This, Rodrigue knows, is a question of their responsibilities. Fraldarius is stable, its watch on the Alliance unnecessary in these days of peace and its borders no longer the line that holds against Sreng. Its lands are as harsh as any in Eastern Faerghus, second only to Galatea and Gautier, but Rodrigue has given much of his life to its good management, and his brother has a strong head for administration. Rodrigue can afford to part from it for even months at a time when necessity asks.

Gautier is different. Gautier has not known peace in two hundred years. Its lord is an only child, its fields fed on blood that burns its frozen dirt. The ruling Margrave is not to leave Gautier. So Ambrose must stay where he is, and Rodrigue must go to him there.

Is that truly it, he wonders? Or is simply that Ambrose prefers to have Rodrigue in this private study, set neatly in an armchair amidst all the other things Ambrose wants to keep to himself?

“Are you still with me, old friend?”

Rodrigue blinks away the bleariness in his vision. Ambrose is before him, moved from his own favored armchair by the fireplace with a decanter in his hand and a smile on his lips. It has been some time since Rodrigue has sat with him like this—often, visits are eaten up with the hunting parties that neither Lambert nor Ambrose can seem to resist when they’re together, with business conducted in the light-flooded official office of the Margrave, with large dinners necessitated by the three of them and Petyr coming together alongside all four of their wives.

If this is how Ambrose prefers to see him, Rodrigue realizes, then it has been a very rare thing for Rodrigue to let him have it. They are rarely alone. They are even more rarely alone together here.

With both Lambert and Rodrigue's wives dead now, perhaps it will come more often.

“Forgive me,” Rodrigue says, as Ambrose refills Rodrigue’s glass from the decanter. “My mind was wandering. The trip feels longer than it once did, and I am weary from it.”

“I’m pleased you came,” Ambrose replies. His smile has not lost its charm, that easy manner of taking possession only becoming more comfortable as he has come into his title. “When you promised to send the extra men-at-arms, I didn’t expect we would have the Duke of Fraldarius himself joining us in the fight.”

“I hope it doesn’t presume too much. Your last letter suggested the fighting has been harried of late.” Forcing gusto into his voice, Rodrigue adds, “Those Sreng bastards seemed in need of a reminder that it’s only our mercy letting them keep what’s beyond our border.”

“Always so generous,” Ambrose replies, perching on the arm of Rodrigue’s chair. He holds his own glass lightly between thumb and forefinger, gesturing with it as if heedless of the risk that it might slip from his hold. But of course, it never does. “I wouldn't deny you blood if you wished it. Certainly, a lack of opportunity will be of no concern.”

“Is it that bad?” Rodrigue tries to hold to the duty of this—the border, their kingdom’s security, the reinforcements that Gautier called for. But his mind strains against clarity, and it is difficult for him to trace the logic that has him in this place.

“Not so bad that it is out of my grasp,” Ambrose says, raising his own glass, “but I would never turn from the opportunity to have you and your Relic on our frontlines. It’s been a terribly long time since I’ve stood with you in true combat.” 

He smiles that easy smile again. Rodrigue turns his eyes away.

“I remember the first time we fought together,” Rodrigue says instead. “Under the guidance of the Church. Bandits, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, out in Magdred Way.” Ambrose’s amusement comes out in one of those pleasant-sounding exhales he perfected years ago. “All my questions about why you were learning Faith magic, answered in an instant by our now-king, then-prince.”

Something more had happened then, too. But what time has not dulled, the drink seems to drown, and Rodrigue cannot be bothered with clarification. Rodrigue braces his head in one hand, stubborn against the pressure behind his eyes.

“Careful,” Ambrose says. His playfulness softens as his eyes go sharp. “We mustn’t have the Aegis Shield walk onto the battlefield with unsteady feet. The Sreng aren’t of the highest intellectual caliber, but even they wouldn’t mistake that for a new strategy.”

“I will be steady in the morning,” Rodrigue promises. “As I said, the journey took more out of me than I expected.”

“Of course,” Ambrose says. The hand that settles on Rodrigue’s shoulder comes with the extra weight of Ambrose’s advantage in position. “Just tell me when you’re ready to turn in, and I’ll have a servant see you to your rooms.”

“Don’t trouble them.” A frown furrows his brow, more in consternation than from the fuzziness from the drink. “It’s already so late. I know the way.”

“Oh, your rooms were moved,” Ambrose replies, waving a hand. It gets Rodrigue looking at him, and Ambrose answers the look with politely distant incredulity. “It seemed more appropriate to have you elsewhere.”

With slow wariness earned from a half-decade as a royal advisor and nearly as long as a parent, Rodrigue asks, “How so, Ambrose?”

Ambrose glances away from Rodrigue and instead to the glass in his hand. Disdain curls his lip only an elegant amount. “It’s natural, as your host, for us to take such such trivial considerations into our hands, wouldn’t you agree? That you might—forget recent concerns.”

The cold of winter chokes him. Rodrigue tries to breathe the ice from his lungs, but he can't. 

Will he ever breathe freely again?

Even then, he knows that Ambrose is watching him. He knows that Ambrose is watching him as he turns his glass in his hands, inhales carefully, raises his drink to his lips. He knows that Ambrose is watching him swallow it down.

Rodrigue seeks out his voice again. Because it is Ambrose, he meets his eyes and speaks with deliberate care. “I should not have expected any less of you,” Rodrigue tells him. “Forgive me my misjudgement of your hosting, Lord Gautier.”

“Rodrigue,” chides Ambrose, but the smile is back as he practically purrs his reply. He leans over to top up Rodrigue’s drink once more. “It’s my pleasure to anticipate the needs of our favorite guest.” 

“Is it now?” Rodrigue’s fingers curl around his glass. Here in the heart of Castle Gautier, the fireplace does too much to keep the small, well-furnished room warm. The lingering coolness of the drink feels like the only counterbalance to that excess.

“Would I mislead you?” Ambrose answers. “For that matter—” He pushes off from the armrest and sets his glass and decanter down on the table at Rodrigue’s side. Rodrigue finds himself registering the movements distantly, as if through a frosted window pane.

It occurs to him he might be starting to become drunk.

“You needn’t stand on ceremony with me,” Ambrose says, and holds out a hand to him.

Rodrigue studies it, as if its meaning could be clear in the careful angles of its fingers, or in a palm that has seen more battles than even Rodrigue’s own and yet bears no marks from its experience. But no matter how much he looks that hand, he cannot determine what it is asking of him. He only sees the shapes of it.

Ambrose’s eyebrows raise a fraction. “Outerwear is not for indoors, Rodrigue.”

Ah.

Ambrose _did_ always prefer him as the least dressed between them. Rodrigue never minded acquiescing. 

With respect to both this personal tradition and the obligations of a guest, Rodrigue stands, and he does not object to Ambrose’s assistance with the belt at his hips or the buttons of his coat. Where Ambrose pulls, he gives way, and soon enough Rodrigue is down to tunic and breeches, straightening out his clothes while Ambrose, ever attentive, settles his hair back into place.

“Isn’t that better?” Ambrose asks, folding Rodrigue’s robe over one arm.

“It is,” Rodrigue agrees, and finds that it’s the truth. Some of the heat has ebbed away, and he finds his thoughts coming more clearly. Breathing, too, is less difficult now.

“How easy your hair is like this,” Ambrose says, and with an absolute clarity afforded to him by the drink, Rodrigue thinks, _So that’s what is wanted_. The old realization that came when Ambrose unplaited his braid, or placed Rodrigue’s wrists above his head and then drew back, or set a hand on his shoulder and simply pressed down—all those little unspoken demands that were more revealing of Ambrose’s vulnerabilities than they ever were a demonstration of his control.

Ambrose has a wife. Rodrigue knows this. This matters to Rodrigue, as it does not to Ambrose.

Rodrigue does not have a wife any longer.

“Ambrose,” he says, either call or warning, and then stops speaking. Ambrose only watches him. Age has given him patience, even as authority has made him a worse man than he began.

Rodrigue could have loved Ambrose once. He knows that. Rodrigue has always given his heart only where he feels those loyalties are deserved: to Lambert for his courage and generosity, the comfort of his easy companionship and his will to shape the world. To his children, who were his choice to bring into this world and so his responsibility to offer care, and who have already returned so much of that effort with joy, even after all of this.

To Eris.

Always to worthy souls. Not to those who would be careful with his heart—only Eris was ever that, he could never ask it of Lambert or the boys—but those who deserved its devotions, whose greatness was such that the pain was merely a fitting price to pay.

And then there was Ambrose. But what chance for devotion there had been, in those childhood letters where Rodrigue offered up pieces of himself he could barely now recall, in those kisses Ambrose claimed before Rodrigue had had time to think of any mouth other than Lambert’s, in that succession of stolen afternoons—

That chance had been ruined years ago. They have had friendship, and a long-standing trust, and mutual respect. Rodrigue cares for Ambrose and believes that care has been returned as much as Ambrose is able. But he knows better than to set his heart in hands like those.

Even at the Academy, he had sensed that.

“I should be in Fhirdiad,” Rodrigue says. The words come out slowly, like honey congealed by Gautier’s cold, fighting his attempts to spill it out. “Lambert has no notion how to face his grief. And my sons, Glenn especially… I should be helping them.”

Perhaps, when they were younger, this would have incensed Ambrose. Driven him to push Rodrigue away at these challengers to his possession, or pull him nearer to try to drive all else from his head. It would have been enough to change the course of this, one way or another. It would have broken the inevitability.

Instead, Ambrose says, so perfectly it can only be a mask, “You must give yourself time for your own grief, Rodrigue.”

Rodrigue laughs. _He knows, then_ , Rodrigue thinks. Ambrose knows that he only has to wait.

Ambrose says, “I’ll put away your coat.”

And Rodrigue, still standing, waits. He only picks back up his glass.

When Ambrose is again at his side, Rodrigue follows the guidance of the hands that settle him once more in that chair. Ambrose cants his head as he leans back against its arm, and this time, Rodrigue doesn’t mind so much the shift in weight.

“A fortnight here will do you good,” Ambrose tells him as he watches him take another drink. “What good citizen of Faerghus doesn’t find his heart-wounds healed in spilling blood for king and country?”

“Ambrose.” Rodrigue gathers his strength. There must be limits. “You know I can’t stay long. I have a few days at most.”

Ambrose looks at him like he’s more disappointed in the effort than the claim itself. “Is that so?” he asks, very lightly. He almost succeeds in masking the irony. “You know I would never keep you against your wishes.”

“I have a duty,” Rodrigue reminds him.

“You do,” Ambrose agrees, idly swirling his drink. “And we must always answer our duties, mustn’t we?” 

“The border is your responsibilities, but this is mine.” Rodrigue doesn’t know why he’s saying this. There is never any point to it. It never changes anything. “I must see to my sons. To Lambert.”

Ambrose sighs, soft and deliberate, and he sets aside his glass. “Dutiful as ever. But you forget: you needed help taking off your own coat. Do you truly imagine you’re any use to kin or king like this?”

When Eris died, she died alone.

The doctors would not allow Rodrigue to go to her side. They insisted that the risk of contagion was too much. If he did go near her, they said, then he could not be with their newborn. He had to choose. So he did.

Glenn screamed for his mother. The baby screamed too, but its cries were without accusation, and its griefs could be consoled. Glenn screamed, and he argued, and he raged at his father for abandoning his mother. He said he would never forgive him for making him abandon her too.

That was normal, the doctors said. Glenn was very young. He didn’t understand what was happening. His anger would pass.

For a month, Rodrigue communicated with his wife in the letters he wrote her and the messages she returned through her doctors’ mouths. He told her that he loved her. She told him he was obnoxiously sentimental, but she loved him too. He told her he was sorry. She told him she would not have forgiven him if he had chosen her over the newborn. He told her he would protect their children. She told him what she wanted to name their second son.

After she died, they gathered up her clothing and her bedding and burned them. Because she had kept his letters at her bedside, the doctors told him, they had to go too.

He still needs to go through what is left. He did try to do it, before. He had gone to the chest where she kept her most prized weapons, unlocked it, and found himself unable to move.

Then he got news of Ambrose’s call for reinforcements. So he answered it.

There are fingers, settled underneath his jaw, uncomfortable but never unkind in their pressure. Rodrigue opens his eyes, and he sees Ambrose before him and raised above. Steady, waiting.

Ambrose says, “You have to let yourself grieve, Rodrigue.”

“Ambrose.” It is a warning. It is the last warning he has in him. When he says Ambrose’s name a second time, it is a call.

The sobs come drunk and messy and tired. He cannot mistake the hold Ambrose offers him for understanding, but he still takes it, still lets Ambrose tug the glass from his hand and set it aside, still closes his eyes as Ambrose cards fingers through his hair and murmurs, _There you are_ , claiming these wretched parts of his soul all over again.

They always say the men of Faerghus are lions. But Ambrose was born under the Red Wolf Moon, and in his maturity he has learned to hunt as one, patient in his pursuit, letting what he wants elude him for as long as it might. Even the fiercest of elk in the prime of its life must seek rest eventually, and then the wolf feasts. As long as an animal remains within the wolf’s territory, there is no survival, only delay. And Rodrigue chooses not to leave. 

It was foolish of him to think he had only come close to loving Ambrose. It was foolish of him to believe he could ever take back the pieces of his heart he had given away long before he knew what he’d done.

That first night, Rodrigue does not accept what Ambrose has offered. But before the two weeks of his visit are over, Rodrigue remembers the habit, and Ambrose is there, waiting for him. They have grown, settled into their roles and made themselves into something more than they were in youth’s wildness. Yet the rhythm for drowning his grief in the depths of Ambrose’s possession has not changed. 

It's a kind of comfort, in its way. Rodrigue can be grateful for that.

Rodrigue goes home to his children, and he does all he can to be the father they need. He goes to Fhirdiad to his king and most beloved friend, and he does all he can to be the advisor and companion that would serve their country best.

He writes Ambrose letters.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on twitter at [@marezafic](https://twitter.com/marezafic). More information on this universe, fondly nicknamed the JCU (Jock Cinematic Universe), can be found in [this twitter moment](https://twitter.com/i/events/1195471121732243456?s=13). It includes art of this very moment, [here](https://twitter.com/februeruri/status/1194044933088456704)!


End file.
